The Existence of God

A Philosophical Introduction

Yujin Nagasawa

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136737459
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Philosophy
• Categoria: Philosophy History & Theory

Does God exist? What are the various arguments that seek to prove the existence of God? Can atheists refute these arguments? The Existence of God: A Philosophical Introduction assesses classical and contemporary arguments concerning the existence of God:

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• the ontological argument, introducing the nature of existence, possible worlds, parody objections, and the evolutionary origin of the concept of God
• the cosmological argument, discussing metaphysical paradoxes of infinity, scientific models of the universe, and philosophers' discussions about ultimate reality and the meaning of life
• the design argument, addressing Aquinas's Fifth Way, Darwin's theory of evolution, the concept of irreducible complexity, and the current controversy over intelligent design and school education.

Bringing the subject fully up to date, Yujin Nagasawa explains these arguments in relation to recent research in cognitive science, the mathematics of infinity, big bang cosmology, and debates about ethics and morality in light of contemporary political and social events.

The book also includes fascinating insights into the passions, beliefs and struggles of the philosophers and scientists who have tackled the challenge of proving the existence of God, including Thomas Aquinas, and Kurt Gödel - who at the end of his career as a famous mathematician worked on a secret project to prove the existence of God.

The Existence of God: A Philosophical Introduction is an ideal gateway to the philosophy of religion and an excellent starting point for anyone interested in arguments about the existence of God.

PART 1

AN ARMCHAIR PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

[The ontological argument] is very beautiful and really very ingenious.

G. W. Leibniz

[The ontological argument is the] most famous of all fishy philosophical arguments.

Robert Nozick

Considered by daylight … and without prejudice, this famous Ontological Proof is really a charming joke.

Arthur Schopenhauer

1 Gödel’s secret project

On January 14, 1978, at the age of 71, the mathematician Kurt Gödel died in Princeton Hospital in New Jersey. In its obituary of Gödel, The Times (London) described him as ‘the most influential mathematical logician of the century’ and his incompleteness theorems as proofs that ‘changed the whole philosophical view of the foundation of mathematics’.

Gödel published the incompleteness theorems in 1931, when he was 25 years old. The theorems show, roughly speaking, that (i) in any consistent axiomatic system of arithmetic there always exists a formula such that, ironically, its truth or falsity cannot be proved within the system itself (i.e., the system is not complete); and, on the other hand, (ii) if the truth or falsity of all the formulae in a system can be proved within that system (i.e., the system is complete), the system cannot prove the consistency of the system itself. Many scholars were astonished by Gödel’s discovery, because they had believed that, however messy and chaotic the material world is, the world of mathematics was always complete and elegant. Gödel’s theorems demolished such a naive view of mathematics. In 1999, Time magazine included Gödel in its list of the greatest scientists and thinkers of the twentieth century, along with Francis Crick, James Watson, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Alan Turing.

Despite Gödel’s glorious academic achievements his demise was little known outside mathematics, and the public memorial service for him was not very well attended. More shockingly, when he passed away he weighed only 65 pounds.

Gödel was an obsessed and paranoid genius. In the depths of winter, he wore warm clothes indoors and opened all the windows because he believed that someone was trying to kill him with poisonous gas. He refused to eat anything but what his wife Adele cooked because he believed that someone was attempting to poison his food. Allegedly, one of the primary causes of Gödel’s death was that Adele became ill and could no longer cook for him. He preferred to die from starvation rather than eat what someone else had prepared.

Gödel met Adele in a night-club in Vienna in 1927, when he was 21. Gödel’s parents disapproved of his relationship with her because she was a dancer, divorced, and six years older than he was. Adele, however, provided indispensable loving support to Gödel throughout his life. For his colleagues and students, Gödel was not always an easy person to work with; his eccentric behavior and bizarre opinions often puzzled people around him. However, he was always gentle and faithful to Adele, and he looked after her both financially and emotionally. He paid for virtually everything for her, and, apparently, she learned how to write checks only after his death.

A few years before his death, there was a rumor among mathematicians that Gödel was working on something odd, something distinctively different from his usual mathematical projects. More specifically, according to the rumor, he was devoting himself to a ‘proof’ of the existence of God.

Gödel left notes that are dated February 10, 1970 and filled with many mathematical symbols. The notes show that Gödel was doing research on a proof of the existence of God that is known among philosophers as the ‘ontological argument’ or the ‘ontological proof’. The ontological argument, which was first clearly formulated in the Middle Ages, proposes that one can prove the existence of God simply by analyzing the concept of God. Gödel’s aim was to reformulate and strengthen this medieval argument by adapting tools that were familiar to him from mathematical logic.

Gödel was a theist. In his answer to a sociologist’s questionnaire that he filled in but never returned, he described his religious position as follows: ‘Baptist Lutheran (but not member of any rel. cong.) My belief is theistic, not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza.’¹ However, Gödel’s interest in the ontological argument seemed to be purely intellectual; it was not directly connected to his religious commitment. Some believe that Gödel did not publish his work on the ontological argument precisely because he did not want others to think that he had become deeply religious.²

So what is the ontological argument by which Gödel was absorbed near the end of his life? Why did he become interested in the argument if his interest was not motivated by his religious commitment? In order to answer these questions – and to appreciate the strength of the ontological argument – we must go back to the eleventh century.

2 Anselm’s discovery

Some philosophers claim that the roots of the various ontological arguments can be traced to Ancient Greece.³ However, there is a consensus among scholars that St. Anselm of Canterbury – one of the founders of scholasticism and one of the most influential medieval philosophers and theologians – invented the argument independently and formulated it clearly for the first time. Anselm introduced the argument in his book the Proslogion, which he wrote between 1077 and 1078.

Anselm was born in either 1033 or 1034 in Aosta, a city in the kingdom of Burgundy. Aosta is located in the Italian Alps and near the borders of what are now France and Switzerland. Anselm’s father Gundulph was a Lombard who became a citizen of Aosta and his mother Ermenberga was from a traditional Burgundian family. Gundulph and Ermenberga were in great contrast with each other. Gundulph was a harsh and ill-tempered man and refused consent when his son, Anselm, expressed his desire to enter a monastery at the age of 15. Ermenberga, on the other hand, was a wise and virtuous woman who taught Anselm the joy of learning and thinking. After his mother’s death, Anselm decided to leave home, because his father’s harshness had become unbearable. He crossed the Alps, travelled to France and eventually arrived at Normandy, where he studied under Lanfranc, prior of the Benedictine abbey of Bec and a prominent theologian. At the monastery of Bec, Anselm devoted himself to scholarly work on theology. In 1060, he entered the abbey as a novice and in 1063, when Lanfranc was appointed abbot of Caen, Anselm was elected as prior. Anselm became abbot of Bec in 1078, upon the death of the founder and first abbot. At Bec, Anselm produced important works including the Monologion (1076) and the Proslogion (1077–8).

Archbishop Lanfranc, Anselm’s old master, died in 1089, but England’s KingWilliam Rufus held open the post of archbishop for four years in order to take the revenues for his own purposes. Rufus was not a committed Christian and he did not cooperate with efforts to reform the Church. Nevertheless, in 1093, Rufus finally decided to appoint Anselm Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm was not very keen to take the position, as he sensed, given Rufus’s attitude, that his tenure as archbishop would be difficult. Unlike his father, William the Conqueror, Rufus did not want to spend money on the Church and instead raided monasteries when he needed funds.

In 1097, when Anselm went to Rome without permission, Rufus forbade him to return. Rufus’s successor, Henry I, invited Anselm to return. As it transpired, however, Henry was almost as enthusiastic as Rufus was about the idea of royal jurisdiction over the Church, and Anselm was exiled again, from 1103 to 1107. Two years later, in April 1109, Anselm died at the age of 76 among his monks in Canterbury. He was canonized in 1494 by Alexander VI and named a Doctor of the Church on his memorial day in 1720 by Pope Clement XI. Anselm’s work did not attract much attention in his time. Some scholars ascribe this lack of interest to the style of Anselm’s writings. While the works of most other influential theologians in the Middle Ages are systematically structured treatises, Anselm’s works are mainly dialogues and tracts covering a variety of issues.

Anselm was a radical and controversial leader. He ordered priests, deacons, and canons to abandon their wives and prohibited sons from inheriting their fathers’ churches. He claimed that some of the priests in England did not consider the spiritual needs of Christians sufficiently and spent too much time pleasing their patrons. Anselm is also said to have been the first in the Church to oppose the African slave trade. In 1102, Anselm obtained from the national ecclesiastical council at Westminster a prohibition of the slave trade. The council decreed, ‘Let no one hereafter presume to engage in that nefarious trade in which hitherto in England men were usually sold like brute animals.’⁴ In his book the Monologion Anselm introduced several independent arguments that jointly support the existence of God. He was, however, not entirely satisfied. He wanted to accomplish what might be regarded as the dream of theistic philosophers: to discover a single proof that is so powerful that every rational person could not but admit the existence of God. In the preface of the Proslogion Anselm describes vividly and honestly what a struggle it was for him to search for such an argument. He writes:

After I had published [the Monologion] … I began to wonder if perhaps it might be possible to find one single argument that for its proof required no other save itself, and that by itself would suffice to prove that God really exists, that He is the supreme good needing no other and is He whom all things have need of for their being and well-being, and also to prove whatever we believe about the Divine Being.⁵

While Anselm believed firmly in God, it was extremely difficult for him to find such an argument for God’s existence. Anselm describes the difficulty as follows:

But as often and as diligently as I turned my thoughts to this, sometimes it seemed to me that I had almost reached what I was seeking, sometimes it eluded my acutest thinking completely, so that finally, in desperation, I was about to give up what I was looking for as something impossible to find.⁶

When we cannot find a solution to a problem, even though we have invested a lot of time and effort, often the best thing to do is try to shift our focus for a moment. Sometimes inspiration strikes us while our attention is elsewhere. Human nature does not seem to have changed over the last 900 years, because this trick worked for Anselm as well:

However, when I had decided to put aside this idea altogether, lest by uselessly occupying my mind it might prevent other ideas with which I could make some progress, then, in spite of my unwillingness and my resistance to it, it began to force itself upon me more and more pressingly. So it was that one day when I was quite worn out with resisting its importunacy, there came to me, in the very conflict of my thoughts, what I had despaired of finding, so that I eagerly grasped the notion which in my distraction I had been rejecting.⁷

Anselm was so excited about his discovery that he decided to share it with the public:

Judging, then, that what had given me such joy to discover would afford pleasure, if it were written down, to anyone who might read it, I have written the following short tract dealing with this question as well as several others, from the point of view of one trying to raise his mind to contemplate God and seeking to understand what he believes.⁸

What, then, is Anselm’s ontological argument?

The first step in Anselm’s ontological argument is to define God as ‘that-than-which-no-greater-can-be-thought’. This definition seems acceptable to most traditional theists because, according to Judaeo-Christian-Islamic theism, God is a perfect being and no other creatures are superior to God. Unlike human beings, who are subject to many limitations, He⁹ knows everything (He is omniscient), He can do anything that it is logically possible to do (He is omnipotent), and He is morally perfect (He is omnibenevolent). Anselm says that once this definition of God is accepted, we can prove that such a God exists merely by analyzing the concept of God alone.

It is sometimes thought, not only among atheists but also among theists, that the Anselmian concept of God, as that-than-which-no-greater-can-be-thought, is an unnatural, philosophical artifact of scholasticism. This is partly because the concept assumes individual divine attributes such as omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence, which are highly complex philosophical concepts. However, contemporary research in developmental psychology and cognitive science suggests that the Anselmian concept of God might not be an unnatural artifact after all. Some researchers in these fields maintain that the concepts of the divine attributes that are assumed by the Anselmian concept are naturally formed in childhood. The twentieth-century Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget hypothesized that children younger than seven years old ascribe omniscience and omnipotence to adults, especially to their parents. This makes sense because there is a survival advantage for young children in trusting adults unquestioningly. By utterly trusting adults, children can acquire knowledge and skills that are useful for securing food and shelter. Adopting a skeptical stance towards adults, on the other hand, is not beneficial to children at all in this respect. Piaget’s hypothesis has been confirmed by recent empirical studies undertaken by cognitive scientists. These studies suggest that young children naturally first form a belief that adults are omniscient and omnipotent, and later, as they grow up, correct such a belief.¹⁰ One might wonder if children also ascribe omnibenevolence, that is, moral perfection, to adults. The cognitive scientist of religion Justin L. Barrett contends that it might well be the case that, just as children overestimate the knowledge and power of adults, they might overestimate the morality of adults as well.¹¹ Cognitive science of religion is a very new field, but it is interesting to note that it provides empirical data which seem to imply that the Anselmian concept of God has cognitive and developmental origins. (See the next part of this book for more findings in the cognitive science of religion.)

Anselm calls a person who sincerely denies the existence of God ‘the fool’, a phrase that he presumably derived from the Bible: ‘The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good’ (Psalm 14:1).¹² Anselm sa...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: An armchair proof of the existence of God
• Part II: ‘Follow the evidence wherever it leads’: evolution vs. intelligent design
• Part III: The big bang, infinity, and the meaning of life
• Conclusion: Additional arguments for and against the existence of God
• Notes
• Further reading
• Bibliography
• Index